


Easy Does It

by Jacobi



Series: Black Irish Boys [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hydra, The winter soldier has seizures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-24
Updated: 2020-03-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23299264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacobi/pseuds/Jacobi
Summary: What saved the soldier was this: he was nice to look at.
Series: Black Irish Boys [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/865926
Kudos: 12





	Easy Does It

What saved the soldier was this: he was nice to look at.

That's what had saved Bucky Barnes, growing up in another boy's back pocket: he was nice to look at and he could throw a punch.

_You will shape centuries_ They had told him.

But all the soldier felt was the press of time, a weariness deep in his bones, the knowing that none of it would ever end. Forever and a week was a long time and that was how long he was living.

The thing was, the soldier was very aware that he did not want to follow orders. He did not want to shoot. He did not want to hit the target.

But he did.

He didn't have enough context about his past to piece together who he was. With no identity, a person had nothing.

So the soldier waited. He created an identity for himself.

He meant it to be one of dependability and follow-through, because it seemed like something that maybe he'd always wanted to be known for but couldn't quite make it stick.

Only violence has a way of twisting up intentions and by the time it was through with the soldier, his identity had become ruthless and unforgiving. Deadly accurate. A killing machine.

How fascinating it was that the machine could have a conscious.

So they tried to shock it out of him until the soldier developed a permanent stutter. Funny thing about back-ally super serums- they don't regenerate brain damage.

The soldier had a lot of brain damage, but it wasn't on purpose. He was their most prized treasure, the Winter Soldier, a Ghost. But he was the only one and he would be the only one and nobody thought to study the effects of prolonged seizures on the body of the killing machine. He was only a machine after all, and once his gears stopped turning, he would be scrapped.

They kicked him in the head until somebody thought that loosing his eyesight would be a significant problem for his completion of an upcoming assassination.

They fixed that by breaking his ribs.

But they couldn't stop the seizures. If the soldier was out of his tank for too long without being wiped, his brain would begin to rewire the pathways to ancient memories that were locked away for a reason and this rewiring caused the seizures. The chair caused seizures too, but that couldn't be avoided because the soldier was never fully cooperative.

So the brain was forced into a constant state of half-repair. Just enough for the body to function regularly, but not enough for a concrete sense of self to be reclaimed, not enough for the mind to heal. And the stutter stayed.

Really, what saved the soldier was this: he was nice to look at.

The technicians grew fond of his face and kept it the same, never altering it. The rest of his body became something else entirely. But his face never changed.

Somebody recognized him once. He saw it in her eyes after he shot her through the stomach with a Soviet slug, no riffling.

Later, he had the tune of a children's song, the itsy-bitsy-spider, rattling around in his junked up skull.

The soldier had a seizure. Not all of his seizures where full-body, ground writhing productions. Sometimes he only zoned out and lost a few minutes, hours. Half of a day once. It was difficult for the soldier to distinguish these seizures from his regular state of blankness.

What it came down to was this: the soldier's seizures and his face were what saved him.

The man on the helicarrier reminded him of a fire escape and a funeral. Fake flowers and a hurt so deep it had to be his chest breaking from the inside out. _Then don't goddamn leave me-_

The soldier paused, fist raised, the man pinned beneath him. He had a seizure.

The soldier wasn't sure how he ended up in the water. But it had been two months since he'd been in the chair and then the tank, and his brain had snapped something together. It was nothing spectacular, just two small jigsaw pieces of the same color; the color of the man's name in his mouth- _Steve Rogers_

_Steve Rogers is falling_

_I fell_

_Forever and a week_

The soldier dragged Steve Rogers to the river bank. The earth was spongy and it stuck underneath his fingernails like the dirt he'd thrown-where?

Onto the coffin of... he'd thrown a handful. And it had stayed under his fingernails for months, it seemed.

His chest was cracking open. _Forever and a week, I'll die laying on top of the grave_

The soldier had a bizarre urge to drape his own body over the man who was slowly coming to, choking up bloody river water. A sudden impulse to die on top of him. The weariness made his bones ache like _Steve Rogers_ made his head throb. The soldier walked away-

_Don't goddamn leave me_

The soldier walked away.


End file.
